NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The purpose of quantitative easing was to keep long term U.S. Treasury and agency mortgage backed yields low. The Federal Reserve implemented QE 3 on Sept. 13, 2012, with the purchases of $40 billion in agencies mortgage-backed securities every month. Shortly thereafter on Dec. 12, 2012, QE4 was implemented adding the purchases of $45 billion in longer term U.S. Treasury securities each month.

Guess what, yields are significantly higher today than they were before QE3 and QE4 were implemented, so this policy has failed. I wonder what losses the Federal would have to take if they had the mark these positions to market each month like our major commercial banks have to do.

Wall Street traders and market strategists tout Fed policy as calming the stock markets. What Fed policy engineered was an equities bubble. When yields move higher stocks become less undervalued and more overvalued. This is why stocks have been operating under a ValuEngine valuation warning since mid-March.

Fed policy has helped Wall Street, but what about Main Street. The FOMC thinks that inflation is below their targets, but on Main Street the cost of living is on the rise. Savers must live on lower incomes. New jobs are at a much lower salaries than the jobs that were lost. The cost of owning a home is on the rise from increases in home insurance costs and increases in property taxes, and now increases in mortgage rates.

I always take a pulse of the U.S. economy when my wife and I drive north from Tampa Bay, Fla., to Cranbury, N.J., and when making appearances in New York City as I did last week.

The traffic heading north was the lightest I have ever seen. I thought that the summer driving season began after Memorial Day, but I guess not in 2013. We made it to Rock Mount, N.C., in a record of 10 hours 40 minutes for a normal 12=hour trip. Several times on I-95 I would not see the back of the vehicles in front of me and could not see a vehicle behind me in the rearview mirror.

The price of a gallon of regular gasoline ranged from $3.59 to $3.09 with the cheapest price off the Ben Bernanke Interchange in Dillon, S.C.

A week later on the way south we made it to Santee, S.C., in less than the budgeted 12 hours and home the next day in less than seven hours. The trip up and the trip down were both less than 19 hours when the normal is about 20 hours.

Our exit off I-75 is State Road 52 north of Tampa. This exit had a Waffle House as we began our trip north. On our return trip the Waffle House was closed, stripped of its contents and store name, as another small business bites the dust. The price of a gallon of gasoline at home was up 15 cents. Thanks Ben!

This morning the yield on the U.S. Treasury 10-year note tested my annual value level at 2.476%. On July 25, 2012, this yield hit a record low at 1.377%. That's a rise of more than 100 basis points. If that isn't a sign of QE failure, then what is?